Various types of controlled-environment facilities are present in today's society, and persons may be voluntary or involuntary residents of such facilities, whether temporarily or permanently. Examples of controlled-environment facilities may include correctional institutions (e.g., municipal jails, county jails, state prisons, federal prisons, military stockades, juvenile facilities, detention camps, home incarceration environments, etc.), healthcare facilities (e.g., hospitals, nursing homes, mental health facilities, rehabilitation facilities, such as drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities, etc.), restricted living quarters (e.g., hotels, resorts, camps, dormitories, barracks, etc.), day care centers, babysitter arrangements, child care facilities, elder day care facilities or sites, and the like.
For example, inmates convicted of felony offenses generally serve long sentences in prison (e.g., federal or state prisons), whereas those convicted of misdemeanors receive shorter sentences to be served in jail (e.g., county jail). In either case, while awaiting trial, a suspect or accused may remain incarcerated.
In controlled-environment facilities, correctional facilities for example, inmates are traditionally visually identified multiple times per day to ensure that no person has escaped. These inmate counts are extremely time consuming and expensive for correctional facilities and provide little in the way of documentary proof of an inmate's presence. It is possible for an officer to simply overlook a person during a visual inspection, mistake one inmate for another, or even collude with a prisoner to allow an escapee time to flee the area. Also, due to the extreme time involved, inmate identification and check-ins are only done periodically which gives ample time for escapees to run away before the next scheduled check-in count. Moreover, over the past several years, sharp increases in inmate population has not been followed by a proportional increase in the number of prison or jail staff. To the contrary, budget pressures in local, state, and federal governments have made it difficult for correctional facilities to maintain an adequate number of wardens, officers, and other administration personnel. Hence, many correctional facilities are often pressed to perform basic tasks such as inmate counts.